Whether or not you intend to work as voice over actor, actors are increasingly being selected on the media they put up on the web. Casting directors don't just need to see you, they need to hear you.

Your voice reel is a crucial part of the image you show industry decision makers; given that this is the case you would think actors serious about securing professional paid work would have great voice reels. The truth is actors don't. That's because scripts are chosen hastily, recording studios pressurise people to finish quickly and instead of a great director helping you get every last ounce of Va Va Voom from your script the studio engineer comes up with insightful comments such as, "Yeah mate, sounds ok to me mate was that WAV or MP3 you wanted". These are NOT ingredients for a great voice reel....

The Voice reel CD can be as useful marketing tool as the CV. How else would a potential 'Voice' employer get to know you?

So, what is a Voice-Over CD (sometimes called voice-reel)?
This is a CD you will make in a recording studio, so it is fully edited with effects and music, that contains extracts to demonstrate your voice - and your acting abilities - for various sectors of the voice market:
* Commercials (fully produced so that they sound as if they were transmitted),
* Drama,
* Narrative
* Documentary.

Unless you are talking the student rate, all the script material will be provided by the production company, though it can be useful to bring along any drama scripts that have worked for you in the past.
You do not need to cover every category. You may not be comfortable with a particular section. Not everyone wants to make radio drama, for example. The actor should focus on what is best for his or her voice. So, we will tailor the voice reel to you.
What if you have never used a microphone before?
No problem. You will be guided quite carefully whilst recording. You do not need to have any previous experience.

How long should the record take?
It takes between one hour and two hours for recording. Plus one hour for editing, mixing and burning the CD. We would love if you want to be part of the editing stage.
Bear in mind that some pre-production needs to be done in advance. Give us at least one week to prepare yours voice reel.

We offer two packages:
- 5 tracks £165
- 10 tracks £350


* we don't charge for a hourly rate. We charge per project

* Free consultation - During this session you can feed in any particular skills, like fluent second languages, to be scripted and included in the CD. But you cannot expect to take the material away with you if you want!

* A creative director. You will receive direction and support on the microphone with a technician.



Animation - £165
if you want to work within the animation arena, your CD needs to be entirely different from the standard one. It needs to be at least 6 tracks of no more than 30 seconds each, and the requirements are:
* Forget naturalism - forget all that stuff about making it real!
* Show extraordinary vocal and age range.
* Show different accents and different characters, e.g. a talking weevil.
* Show massive flexibility.
* Don't be tame.
* Each must have a different 'weight' of voice bearing in mind that you may be cast as half a dozen different characters in the same programme.
* Watch as much animation as possible and learn from that.
* The animator works to the vocal performance, not the other way around, so the sheer magnitude of characterisation is all! It’s got to be bigger and bolder than just 'real'.

Forwarding my latest post about mp3 quality I decided to make a post about the future of the Format Replacement Cycle.

When the CD format came out, fans upgraded their LP collections, igniting a boom in sales that lasted from 1984 to 2000. When the MP3 format trickled up from the tech-geek community, fans ripped their CDs to their computers and downloaded free digital files of the web, causing a decline in sales that has lasted from 2000 until present day. No, it's not true!!! Some fans have re-bought their music collections several times...

As Forrester analyst Mark Mulligan suggests, the MP3 has failed to generate a format replacement cycle. Fans didn't race to upgrade their music collections as they have in the past. And they may never do so again. This is problematic, as a substantial portion of revenues and resurgences in the music industry have been caused by fans replacing their music collections. Will it be another format replacement cycle generated anytime soon? What format will it be?

There are several music formats right now that seek to challenge the MP3: high quality downloads, dynamic music downloads, music streaming, USB drives, music apps and video albums.
As music becomes cheaper to transfer over the web, it's inevitable that higher quality downloads will be offered. Some places sell them, but iTunes doesn't yet. One of the main gripes about the MP3 has always been the quality of its sound. Hopefully, one day, this will be fixed!!! Some sought to amend the poor consumer experience of the MP3 by bundling it with lots of interactive content like lyrics and video. These MP3s will be able to update themselves and keep fans in the loop long after the initial purchase. This could be the biggest marketing advance in music – ever – but only if it catches on and fans perceive it to be worth the extra money.
Between Viinyl, Spotify, and TinySong the URL may very well become the universal music format. Rather than buying a download and playing it on your digital device, you will just click a URL and it will play. Unfortunately, this format is funded by ads, not hard cash. And that's to say nothing about the fact that fans bookmark, not collect music URLs.
It all ends with consumer experience. We need to give consumers some sort of interactivity. In my opinion, USB drives gives the consumer something that they can use everyday, it's physical (so you have the perception that you own something), it can include music, booklets (in PDF format, Flash or jQuery), videos and everything that you can think of and they can use it for their personal use.
"Apps are the future of music," writes Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm. He deemed them "the second major development in the digital music revolution." Apps hold the same promise of the dynamic download in terms of their capacity to be updated and contain extra media content.

None of these formats have generated a format cycle of their own. But you could argue that each meets the demands of a broader spectrum of audience. Rather than a single format being available to every fan, in the exact same packaging, several formats can now be experimented with at once.

The challenge for new music products is that they need to be social to put the crowd in the cloud, interactive and immersive, ownership still matters but access matters more, they need to be relevant and co-exist and joint the dots in the digital environment.

The young and digital generation have different needs than their older peers. Solely offering them MP3s, CDs, vinyl, or tapes for sale isn't enough. Unlike their parents, the young and the digital may not buy an LP and turn around and buy a CD with the exact same music a few years later. They are only willing to purchase the same music if the right experience – like a video performance or a fan remix – is tied in. They may buy the digipak and app, but not just to update.

The CD boom lasted roughly sixteen years. iTunes has been selling digital music for eight years and is already showing signs of cooling off. If the MP3 has failed to produce a format replacement cycle, will any of these new formats do any better?

The CD saved the music industry from itself. This time around though, it appears as though it will take more than one music format replacement cycle to do so.

Time will tell...

 why the album format died?

I think it’s safe to say that we’re at the end of the “album age,” and although the format will hold on for a while, it’s clearly waning in popularity.

It was all about visual experience. The album format in the vinyl record age had the advantage of that wonderful piece of cardboard known as the album jacket. It contained the cover art (still found on CDs), and most importantly, the liner notes on the back, which we’ll get to in a second. But one thing that everyone either forgets or has never experienced is the fact that millions of albums were purchased completely on impulse because of the album artwork alone! It may be hard to believe, but it was quite common to come across an album cover that was so cool that you’d buy it without knowing a thing about the artist. Sometimes it would be a total loser, but you still had the liner notes to read, and occasionally that would still make it a worthwhile purchase.
It was an informational experience too. The liner notes meant to nearly everyone who bought an album. You could spend hours reading a well-written gatefold jacket, checking out every credit, wondering just where the studios were and generally just soaking up any info you could about the artist. Of course, this was way, way before the Internet, so the liner notes were sometimes the only place to find any of info on the artist at all. To say the least, the visuals and information along with the music made buying an album a total experience that today’s album doesn’t come close to.

The demise of the record stores also helped for the declined of the album format. It was the place to not only buy music, but to spend hours browsing. Why? Because of the cover art and liner notes you’d peel through a bin of records, stopping every so often to look at an intriguing cover, which made you want to read the liner notes, and maybe even buy the album as a result. But the record store was also the best place for word of mouth. The people that worked the record stores always knew what was hot, what was underground but about to pop, and what was overhyped. You could go into a store and ask a clerk, “What’s really good?” and he’d give you 10 choices, most of which were pretty high quality. This is something that the music industry is still looking for today online. Now we call it “music discovery”........

Albums used to be a bargain but the greed started in the early 80’s as the major record labels were taken over by multi-national companies, the attorneys and accountants ruled, and the prices of the album began to rise - first with what they called "superstar pricing".

Then came the CD, and the business went to hell in hand basket. The packaging was different, so the jacket was no longer needed, and as a result, the cover art became less important, and you couldn’t really do extensive liner notes because the print would be too small to read. Then the record labels really got greedy, charging outlandish prices (called “technology charges”) on a product that eventually cost them less than the vinyl records they previously were making.
Of course, there were no more impulse buys anymore because the artwork behind a 5 inch piece of plastic just doesn’t have the same impact as on a 12 inch piece of cardboard.

Furthermore, most vinyl albums were between 35 and 45 minutes long. This was out of necessity because of the physics of a record. Make it any longer and it starts to get noisy, the frequency response suffers, and it won’t be as loud. But 40 minutes or so turns out to be the perfect amount of time for listening. There’s a time commitment you have to make, but it’s well within reason, especially if you like the music.
A CD is capable of containing a bit more than 73 minutes of music. Unfortunately, artists began to think that it was a really good idea to put all the garbage that they normally would’ve tossed from a vinyl record, and put it all on their CD. Now instead of having 40 minutes of great music, we had 55 minutes of mediocrity. Even if the artist had some great songs, it was frequently buried under another 50 minutes of crap. Now not only were the fans paying more money, but they were paying more money for less quality. Something had to give.

Which is just about the time MP3’s came on the scene, which eventually helped push the music business from an album business into the singles business again.

After all it's not just bad news about MP3's.

“You look at the data, somewhere between 4 trillion and 10 trillion songs are illegally downloaded every year. And we’re looking at maybe 4 billion or so legal downloads per year.” - Sean Parker of Napster
Music will always surface on file sharing platforms and consumers will continue to download music for free!! And mp3 should be free, is a format to be used as a promotional tool and not to make money!
Comparing with the film and TV industry, recorded music has being downgrading its quality! By this time we should be listening music in surround sound as a standard but instead we are listening to a crap mp3 and over-compressed sound. It's really what people want to listen? Well, if it's free fair enough but paying for that... I don't think so but it's our fault (all the music industry professionals) because we should teach new generations what is quality sound.
I, as a sound engineer and music producer, when I’m in the studio work at 24 bits/48 or 96 KHz, high quality, clear sound. Why consumers can't get and pay for the same quality? We need to give them new experiences!! Some scientists even say that listening to good music is like sex!!! Do you like cheap sex??? I doubt it!!!
But, saying that, we can't forget that recordings are even more important for artists than ever before. There is a new purpose for recorded content; artists will no longer generate revenue directly from recordings, instead this will be the entrance point for consumers into a brand. Great music will generate revenue through merchandise or ticket purchases, or lead to sponsorships as major brands seek out artists to enhance the value of their own product. The solution to file sharing is for artists to better manage their recorded music by creating a dedicated landing page on their own website, housing a free album download.

You can read more about this topic at:
http://www.musicthinktank.com/blog/how-artists-can-profit-from-file-sharing.html